והיא שעמדה לאבותינו ולנו “And this has stood for our fathers and for us…” The blueprint of Jewish history was revealed to Abraham during the Brit Bein Habesarim, the sublime moment of revelation and Covenant between our forefather and the Creator.  Chazal tell us that the first Jew foresaw the agonizing trail of oppression, so […]

By Joseph Grunblatt Ever since World War II, the problem of how to deal with the Holocaust has replaced all previous challenges facing traditional theologians.  How can we cope with God’s silence in the face of that calamity which destroyed one third of our people, including the cream of the Ashkenazic Torah community? Some responses […]

By Sandor Slomovits Twenty-eight years ago, eleven Israeli wrestlers and officials were murdered at the Munich Olympics.  The tragedy brought up decades-old anger and pain for my parents, both of whom are Holocaust survivors who lost many family members in the concentration camps.  “Only at a German Olympics could this have happened,” my father said […]

By Sarah Shapiro It was erev Pesach, 1944.  The entire Jewish community of Rotterdam — men, women, and children — had just been transferred from Vesterbork, a deportation camp in Holland, to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.  Conditions in Vesterbork had been harsh, but continued religious observance had, to some extent, preserved the Jews’ […]

By Bezalel Naor As a young man, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) had a clear sense of his mission in life.  A younger contemporary of Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk, he knew that unlike Reb Chaim, he would leave his mark on the world not as the innovator of a new method of halachic analysis, […]